Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Nullifies Differences Between Bash, Csh
Andreas(R) writes "Red Hat Software has revealed that future versions of the distribution will hide the differences between command-line user interfaces, creating a 'more unified shell prompt experience'. 'I don't mind if they rebrand and unify the GNOME and KDE interfaces,' said one Linux longhair. 'Frankly, I rarely use GUIs. But when they start messing with my CLI, then it's personal. I'm not going to sit here and let Red Hat infect my beloved tcsh with those annoying quirks from bash." Ah, nothing like satire that only a small group will truly grok. *grin*
Seriously though, MacOSX includes zsh and just about every Linux and BSD distro has a port. Give it a shot. It's worth it.
# Peter's
# Comfort options
setopt CORRECT AUTO_LIST AUTO_MENU
alias ls='ls -F'
alias ll='ls -laF'
# Tab completion for "cd" only returns directories
compctl -g '*(-/)
# Set the prompt
PROMPT='%m}%~> '
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Please keep in mind that the reason we have the wide variety of shells is because each has their own stengths and weaknesses. For example, csh on the surface is more user friendly, but once you start doing non-trival things with you, you quickly run into "quoting hell" (long before dll hell existed there was quoting hell). The original shell sh was unforgiving and inflexible. Korn shell, ksh, was pretty nifty, but it was never as widely adopted as it should have been, probably because it did not propagate the problems of csh.
Anyway, my point here is to say that if one is going to work at the command line level, it really does matter which shell you use. And, combined shells, shells that try to be all shells in one always involve compromise, making some things less good and others better than they are in the un-mingled shells. Thus, I really don't see the value in yet another round of trying to merge the shells into a single shell, and then have everything split off again.
Some people argue that scripting is now dominated by the "higher level scripting languages" such as Perl, and thus it no longer matters which shell you use. I guess I could buy this IF all scripting was done in these languages AND they were universal in all Unix/Linux systems. But, I don't see it being there right now. Which is what really matters, because when I have to write my next portable shell script, I'm still going to have to pick my shell, and I'm going to end up going for the closest to ksh that I can find.